Faculty/Author Profile

Karen Peltz Strauss

Federal Communications Commission

Deputy Chief, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau

Washington, DC, USA

Karen Peltz Strauss is the Deputy Bureau Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission, where she helps to oversee the FCC’s implementation of federal laws requiring access to communication and video programming technologies by people with disabilities, including the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). Over the past five years, Strauss helped lead efforts at the Commission to achieve the timely completion of rules implementing the CVAA, including rules on advanced communications services, closed captioning, video description and video programming device interfaces. Prior to joining the FCC, Strauss spent over 30 years as one of the nation’s premier attorneys on disability-related matters, during which she drafted several laws on access to telecommunications, television, and more recently the Internet.

From 2001-2010, Strauss also consulted for non-profit, governmental and private organizations on communications-related matters. Earlier in her career, Strauss was legal counsel for Gallaudet University’s National Center for Law and Deafness and the National Association of the Deaf. In 2006, Strauss published A New Civil Right: Telecommunications Equality for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans, a book covering the forty year struggle of Americans who are deaf and hard of hearing to obtain basic access to telecommunications. In 2011, Strauss received an honorary doctorate degreefrom Gallaudet University for her work on communications accessibility. Strauss also holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an L.L.M. from the Georgetown University Law Center.